SparkFun Electronics

Failure modes of radar sensor

Failure modes of radar sensor

Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2018 4:38 pm

by JohnnyGood1

Hi everyone,

I got my hands on a Bosch mid-range radar (MRR) sensor that I believe belonged to a Tesla model S a while back. Now I'm working on a school project where we try to get the sensor to fail (i.e., output wrong or unusable data). Those of us involved in the project have defined a goal of understanding more about why radar fails in general but also what aspects of Bosch's specific sensor design might contribute to a failure.

So far, some preliminary research has revealed the following common failure types for automotive radars:

If anyone knows anything about other failure modes that exist, especially for Bosch radars and sensors, it would be interesting to discuss them on this thread.

Thanks!!

Re: Failure modes of radar sensor

Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2018 5:51 pm

by jessejay356

interesting. Is there code available to use this sensor?

Re: Failure modes of radar sensor

Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2018 8:43 am

by JohnnyGood1

We can receive useful messages from it, yes.

Re: Failure modes of radar sensor

Posted: Tue Jul 24, 2018 12:14 pm

by millercommamatt

Radar beams have side lobes which can be an additional source of noise or even produce a false return.

You can get back scatter from targets beyond the sensor range. That is, if you have the range configured for 100 meters and pick up backscatter from an object 150 meters away, the signal processor will think the object is 50 meters away.

Target may exceed the Nyquest velocity, but that's unlikely with this system.

Multiple CWFM radars close together but with different center frequencies can jam each other if the FM windows overlap. For pulsed radars you can use pulse coding. There's an analogous technique for CWFM radars but I'm not sure I've seen a commercial example. Of course, my expertise is in weather radar.

3-body scatter is a potential issue. Look up a radar hail spike.

Beam filling is an issue with small radars with wide beams. For instance, two objects moving in different directions and cancel out each others radial velocity returns. There are some signal processing things you can do to mitigate these types of errors if you're working with data at a low enough level.